Televised sporting events are extremely popular on both free-to-air and pay television, with many channels being solely dedicated to sport. With the advent of more advanced camera technology, quality has increased and new camera shots have been achieved. Cameras located in cricket stumps and inside race cars are now common.
Many sporting activities, such as football and basketball, require complex shot sequences captured using a traditional tripod mounted movable camera controlled by skilled camera operator trained to capture the live action. The present invention provides an alternative where by the cameras can be controlled automatically using servos and encoders enabling an autofocus, and auto zoom, auto pan and tilt. This system enables the camera to receives control signals from a control apparatus to facilitate the capturing of imagery of the game. The cost of placing a skilled camera operator behind each camera is one of the limitations of the manually controlled systems. Furthermore due to health and safety issues regarding the operator, the placement of cameras around the perimeter of the playing field is restricted. A further limitation of a manually controlled system is that camera operators can obscure the action of the sport or stage productions, when close ups are needed as is the case with boxing and ice hockey.
There are numerous automated camera control systems currently available. Most of these systems fall within two categories, namely control systems that utilises a tagged objects, and master/slave camera control systems. System using tags can however be simplistic, and do not provide for the framing and compositional variables that are required for modern day television broadcasting. On the other hand one of the problems with master/slave systems is that the images captured by the slaved cameras are the same as those captured by the master camera, the only difference being that the angle from which the image is captured is different for each camera.
It should be appreciated that any discussion of the prior art throughout the specification is included solely for the purpose of providing a context for the present invention and should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art was widely known or formed part of the common general knowledge in the field as it existed before the priority date of the application.